The Forward reports:
… Natan-Zada had spent his last months in Kfar Tapuach, a tiny West Bank settlement that is a stronghold of the banned Kach movement founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and branded as a terrorist group by the Israeli and American governments. In April, Natan-Zada participated in a march to the Temple Mount — banned and blocked by the Israeli police — that was led by a right-wing Tapuach rabbi, David Ha'ivri. Both men were among the 30 or so people arrested at the event, according to Israeli Defense Ministry officials.
Ha'ivri, a student of Kahane, is one of a number of Tapuach residents with ties to American organizations. He was hosted during a fundraising tour last fall by a number of Chabad-Lubavitch synagogues in the United States as well as by Americans for a Safe Israel, the organization that has led the most prominent anti-disengagement rallies. The tour came just six months after Ha'ivri was arrested by Israeli authorities for "incitement to violence." …
When reached by the Forward, Ha'ivri said his organization had no links to terrorism.
"Violence is a terrible thing," Ha'ivri said, avoiding direct condemnation of last week's shooting. In one recent essay on his Web site, Ha'ivri wrote, "We don't use violence and break the law for its own sake."…
In recent years Israeli and Jewish spokesmen have frequently condemned what is described as a failure of Arab and Palestinian leaders to disassociate themselves from terrorist groups and their supporters. But given the links between some American opponents of disengagement and Kach associates in Tapuah, it is unclear whether the American Jewish community has established a firewall between Israeli extremists and mainstream organizations.
In recent months, a small group of Chabad activists in Israel have come under the scrutiny of security forces because of militant anti-withdrawal activism. A few days after Natan-Zada's attack in the Israeli Arab town of Shfaram, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz ordered that an American teenager living in Kfar Chabad, a Lubavitch stronghold, and two other young men be put under administrative detention for two months.
A Los-Angeles based American leader of the Chabad movement, Rabbi Dovid Eliezrie, told the Forward that "there's nobody in any official position at Chabad that advocates for violence. Chabad has an anathema to any kind of violence."
When asked about Ha'ivri's appearance at numerous Chabad synagogues last fall, Eliezrie said the congregations were under the impression that Ha'ivri was raising money for victims of terrorism in Israel.…
[S]ome Chabad groups have cooperated with Kach-linked activists in the past to oppose Israeli territorial concessions and settlement evacuation..…
[M]any scholars of terrorism say that from the facts that have already emerged, it is clear that Natan-Zada was not an aberration, but a clear outgrowth of the current atmosphere of incitement in Israel.
"As with Palestinian terrorism, it's clear that although he was one man executing the act, there is no doubt he was relying on assistance, both spiritually and logistically," said Jonathan Fighel, a senior researcher at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center's International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism.…
Perhaps the most disturbing foreshadowing of Natan-Zada's attack was a shadowy mystical ceremony, known as a "pulsa dinura," in which participants prayed, just two weeks before the killing spree, for Prime Minister Sharon's death. The participants made an explicit point of performing the ritual at the grave of Shlomo Ben Yosef, a pre-independence Israeli resistance fighter who was hanged by the British after opening fire on an Arab bus in 1938.…
In 1994, a Kach member, Baruch Goldstein, opened fire in a mosque in Hebron, killing 29 worshippers. Goldstein is celebrated on the Web sites of many of Kahane's followers, including Ha'ivri.…